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Carol Ann Duffy, Premonitions -Writing One
We first met when your last breath
cooled in my palm like an egg;
you dead, and a thrush outside
sang it was morning.
I backed out of the room, feeling
the flowers freshen and shine in my arms.
Does love and the loss of love make time travellers of us all?
Who have we met at the final moment but a stranger whose extinction is literally out of this world's words? So Duffy tries to find words and ways to grasp this weight of loneliness, and the words and ways lead back to the reanimation and recuperation of the lost figure. Where can death take us but backwards to the resurrection of the beloved? And says Duffy here, death is marked by incongruities and anomalies all conspiring to agitate us into some unvisited place, beyond desolation or consolation. And yet not so
English Tuition Manchester and Bolton Review June 2009
June has turned blissfully warm and all my GCSE and A level students are on the best side of their examinations, now all enjoying the possibility of a long hot summer! Each year I forget how hectic the focus on so many different texts and writing strategies becomes. But this year, perhaps more than ever before, I have realised the immense value of self-confidence in English Studies. After all, English more than any other subject is about being alive; being present to others and to oneself and no amount of sophisticated vocabulary can disguise the need for such presence in reading and writing about life. Remember David Copperfield's immortal words to his highly reflective lonely self whilst hiding from his ghastly step-family, the Murdstones. 'Reading as if for life.' This expression has always resonated for me and it underlines the salvation of reading and writing. Reading heals. It really can shift you from one place to another and thus completely reframe a situation or emotion so that a new response can be experienced or generated. And human beings are the archetypal regenerators of this planet.!!!
I am also reminded of a superb and most powerful avowal quoted at the front of the Spring 2009 The Reader which is a marvellous magazine issued out of Liverpool University:
'People are dying- it is no metaphor- for lack of something real to carry home when day is done.' ( Saul Bellow, Herzog)
Something is met when you encounter an image, a character, a phrase or even word which hits you. It is that AHA moment where we realise we are not alone on this lonely planet, that another has felt as we have and that words can save us. Words have power, they connect us to others and ourselves. Our world is made up of words.
In a month' s time I should complete my NLP Master Practitioner Training with excellenceforall. Peter McNab and Lynn Byrom have been excellent tutors over the two years and I have found NLP a natural accompaniment to English Tuition. It encourages students to find greater resources within, it empowers students to think more confidently and creatively and it helps to shape and model behaviours which improve understanding. Defintely an added WOW factor in tuition! So many students have told me that they felt better for tuition and I KNOW that a very good part of this relates to the fusion of English with NLP a 'marriage' I will be developing once qualified in July. I also have to thank the wonderful Moira Eribenne deeply for her faith, care and encouragement at Ladybridge ... the training I have delivered there has been invaluable and uplifting. ( For me!!) What a fabulous opportunity I have been lucky enough to enjoy. NLP and English are soulmates!!! Metaphors and anchoring are transformative and transportative(!)
Telling stories enables and empowers...!!!
Janet Lewison, Tusitala
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‘’As an optimist I believe that the power for good of education is nearly limitless and that the teacher has to be vigilant for the slightest trace of diamond in dross….for signs that the student’s disturbed enough to take on the burden of thinking for himself. That he has divine and divining matter in him’
Carol Ann Duffy: Warming her pearls for swine.
Is there such a thing as a bad reading of a text ?
I rather think there is.....Here is a reading of Duffy's famous erotic Upstairs Downstairs ( and in milady's chamber) romp, reduced to sliced white bread banality on a revision site. As daring as last week's Daily Mail.
Warming Her Pearls
for Judith Radstone
Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress
bids me wear them, warm them, until evening
when I´ll brush her hair. At six, I place them
round her cool, white throat. All day I think of her,
resting in the Yellow Room, contemplating silk
or taffeta, which gown tonight? She fans herself
whilst I work willingly, my slow heat entering
each pearl. Slack on my neck, her rope.
She´s beautiful. I dream about her
in my attic bed; picture her dancing
with tall men, puzzled by my faint, persistent scent
beneath her French perfume, her milky stones.
I dust her shoulders with a rabbit´s foot,
watch the soft blush seep through her skin
like an indolent sigh. In her looking-glass
my red lips part as though I want to speak.
Full moon. Her carriage brings her home. I see
her every movement in my head.... Undressing,
taking off her jewels, her slim hand reaching
for the case, slipping naked into bed, the way
she always does.... And I lie here awake,
knowing the pearls are cooling even now
in the room where my mistress sleeps. All night
I feel their absence and I burn.
The central relationship in the poem is between a servant speaker and her employer, maid and mistress. The maid performs humble tasks such as wearing her mistress’ pearls. The word which shows the mistress’ relationship to the maid is ‘bids’; it means she orders the maid to do tasks. The maid prepares her mistress for her nightly social outings. She performs tasks of an intimate nature for her mistress, such as powdering her shoulders. Her mistress relates to her from a sense of power. The necklace she warms for the mistress is thus a sort of rope. But by the end of the poem this so-called rope is also a means to a secret revenge the maid gains in this relationship. The maid may not speak to her mistress as she performs her duties. She cannot communicate to her mistress the damage she knows her body heat is causing the mistress at the parties she attends. The maid is so fascinated by her mistress that she even imagines her undressing. Meanwhile the mistress goes out to great social events but remains a loner. She cannot establish relationships with the men she meets because of the smell of the servant off her white stones. The mistress fails to find love—due to the fact that she carries in her pearls the body odour of her maid. At the end of the poem the maid secretly burns with rage or jealousy at her mistress. But she also burns with satisfaction at the secret revenge she is gaining on her mistress.
Oh dear. This seems to miss the point? Perhaps they spent too long replanting geraniums.
Guernica: Picasso's Nightmare of Representation
 Look closely at this famous painting. How far are the images different from a world we recognise? Think about why the painting depicts the world in this very unusual and dramatic way. Is the painting a ‘realistic’ representation of the world? What type of world is being represented? Why do you think Picasso adopted this style of representation in order to explore an infamous massacre? 1) Now list TEN words that match your feelings about the picture’s message and world. 2) Now look up TEN more words in the dictionary or thesaurus that match the original TEN. Think about ways that these new words alter your original meaning. 3) Now using as many of these words as necessary write a full description of the world represented in the Picasso painting. 4) Think about the iconography. What is the light bulb doing in the picture? Are there any references to bull fighting in the painting? Is the disorder and mayhem everywhere? 5) Whose perspective are we looking from in the painting? Is it childlike? Innocent? Naïve? 6) Is the feeling generated from the painting ambiguous in any way? Are all the images separate from one another or do some images overlay each other? Why? What might this say about interpretation? 7) Now think of a scene you remember. Try to describe the scene in a way which matches the original ‘feeling’ that surrounded the event. Take care to use a vocabulary which ‘fits’ the impact of the memory. The way you represent an ‘event’ is just as important as the details … A tapestry copy of Picasso's Guernica is displayed on the wall of the United Nations building in New York City, at the entrance to the Security Council room. It was placed there as a reminder of the horrors of war. Commissioned and donated by Nelson Rockefeller, it is not quite as monochromatic as the original, using several shades of brown. On February 5, 2003, a large blue curtain was placed to cover this work, so that it would not be visible in the background when Colin Powell and John Negroponte gave press conferences at the United Nations. On the following day, it was claimed that the curtain was placed there at the request of television news crews, who had complained that the wild lines and screaming figures made for a bad backdrop, and that a horse's hindquarters appeared just above the faces of any speakers. Diplomats, however, told journalists that the Bush Administration pressured UN officials to cover the tapestry, rather than have it in the background while Powell or other U.S. diplomats argued for war on Iraq.
Kate Bush and HBL : Happy Birthday 17th January
Never for ever
Babooshka
She wanted to test her husband.
She knew exactly what to do:
A pseudonym to fool him.
She couldn't have made a worse move.
She sent him scented letters,
And he received them with a strange delight.
Just like his wife
But how she was before the tears,
And how she was before the years flew by,
And how she was when she was beautiful.
She signed the letter
"All yours,
Babooshka, Babooshka, Babooshka-ya-ya!
All yours,
Babooshka, Babooshka, Babooshka-ya-ya!"
She wanted to take it further,
So she arranged a place to go,
To see if he
Would fall for her incognito.
And when he laid eyes on her,
He got the feeling they had met before.
Uncanny how she
Reminds him of his little lady,
Capacity to give him all he needs,
Just like his wife before she freezed on him,
Just like his wife when she was beautiful.
He shouted out, "I'm
All yours,
Babooshka, Babooshka, Babooshka-ya-ya!
All yours,
Babooshka, Babooshka, Babooshka-ya-ya!
All yours,
Babooshka, Babooshka, Babooshka-ya-ya!"
My dad's favourite Kate Bush Song. 'Who's this funny bird running up a hill?' And even though he loved Radio 3 and I still don't quite get there....he did have the good taste to love Never For Ever and Kate!
Kate Bush : Them Heavy People - With many thanks!
Two English teachers changed my life : Judy Hatton weaned me off my dad's Alastair Maclean and Erich Von Daniken one library period at Marple Hall High School and suggested Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights; Steve Newman at Liverpool returned a desperately dull undergraduate essay and told me to forget about boring old introductions written by dusty life-less scholars and to read books as if they were writtten by secret agents....it's a 'sneaky business reading...'
Thankyou!!!
Kate Bush introduced the idea of synchronicity and this song still speaks to me as perhaps no other song ...and remember seeing her first concert EVER at Liverpool Empire and my best friend Kath Saunders being trampled upon by teenage boys going hysterical over the red roses Kate was throwing naively out into the crowd! WOW!!!
Them heavy people
Rolling the ball, rolling the ball, rolling the ball to me.
Rolling the ball, rolling the ball, rolling the ball to me.
They arrived at an inconvenient time.
I was hiding in a room in my mind.
They made me look at myself. I saw it well.
I'd shut the people out of my life.
So now I take the opportunities:
Wonderful teachers ready to teach me.
I must work on my mind. For now I realise:
Everyone of us has a heaven inside.
Them heavy people hit me in a soft spot.
Them heavy people help me.
Them heavy people hit me in a soft spot.
Rolling the ball, rolling the ball, rolling the ball to me.
They open doorways that I thought were shut for good.
They read me Gurdjieff and Jesu.
They build up my body, break me emotionally.
It's nearly killing me, but what a lovely feeling!
I love the whirling of the dervishes.
I love the beauty of rare innocence.
You don't need no crystal ball,
Don't fall for a magic wand.
We humans got it all, we perform the miracles.
Them heavy people hit me in a soft spot.
Them heavy people help me.
Them heavy people hit me in a soft spot.
Rolling the ball, rolling the ball, rolling the ball to me.
Rolling the ball, rolling the ball, rolling the ball to me.
Rolling the ball, rolling the ball...
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